Learning D&D 4e | Character Creation

hey everyone one of the great things about Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition is that the process of creating a character is exactly the same no matter what kind of character You're Building in other versions of d d and other role-playing games if you're creating a character such as a spellcaster then you have some different things you need to do because of the spell casting every class has some kind of special choices that are specific to that class and make some of those character building processes just a little bit different from each other with 4th edition however while each class is unique and has different abilities just like in 5th edition and the others the process of creating the character is the same this makes it much easier for new players to take on what might otherwise be considered a more complicated role additionally creating a character in fourth edition is extremely similar to creating a character for some of the other editions of Dungeons and Dragons but let's dig into it and take a look and go through it step by step the first thing that we need to do is think about what kind of character we want do we want to be a tough fighter that uses a sword do we want to be a fighter that keeps their distance and uses a bow or maybe we want to be someone that sneaks around in the shadows or someone that casts spells or someone that heals do we want to play a human or a dwarf or an elf or something else just as with the other versions of Dungeons and Dragons these are decisions that we have to make in 4th edition as well for the purposes of this video I'm going to be creating a dwarf cleric so let's go ahead and fill that in on our character sheet in the rice race field I will put dwarf and cleric and you can see in the player's handbook there is a page that tells you exactly each of the steps that you have to go through to build the character and so we're going to just start at the top and work our way down the first thing we have to look at is our race we've already decided that we're going to make a dwarf so let's go ahead and look at the page about dwarfs and see what information we get you can see on the dwarf page that there is a box that tells us what INF information we have for a dwarf and there's a few specific things first we have the average height for a dwarf is four three to four nine if we like we can go ahead and fill that in here we'll go ahead and put that we are four foot six inches split the difference and the average weight is 160 to 220 pounds we will go ahead and put that we are 185 pounds next we have ability score bonuses of plus two to Constitution and plus two to wisdom we don't actually have our ability scores just yet so we can't really use these and we will just make a note of that on a separate sheet of paper that we get a plus two bonus to Constitution and a plus two bonus for wisdom that'll come into play a little bit later on next our size is medium so we can go ahead and write that down our speed is five squares we'll put that down in the base speed here and then we have vision of low light I'm going to go ahead and write that down in the race features box and then continuing on we have two languages common and Dwarven and at the bottom of the character sheet we can write those down next we have skill bonuses of plus two to dungeoneering and plus two to endurance and so we can put those here as the additional bonuses we'll put it for dungeoneering and then for endurance and then it goes into a bunch of special racial features that you have you have cast iron stomach orvid resilience Dwarven weapon Proficiency in encumbered speed and stand your ground so these are different things that you get for being a dwarf and they're things you need to consider but it'd be a lot to write down all of these details so what I usually do is I will go into the race feature section and I will write down each item so cast iron stomach foreign and I will go ahead and make a note of the page that this is on and this is Page 36. that way I could refer back to it if I need to get the details during the game and I will repeat that process for each of the other things as well with those things recorded we can now go back to our character creation screen and move on to the next step the next thing that we have to do is choose our class which we have we've decided that we're going to play a cleric so let's move ahead to the classes section and take a look at the cleric and you'll notice that we also have another box for the cleric that provides a lot of key information that we need for building out this cleric the first thing that it indicates is that our role is a leader so we will be someone that uses our powers to improve the attacks that our allies can give our power source is divine which means we get it from a deity of our choosing and then it indicates our key abilities of wisdom strength and charisma all three of these items here are more informational to help you play the the character and to help you make decisions as you're building the character we'll particularly want to note that our key abilities are wisdom strength and Charisma and these are the abilities that this character mostly uses with their powers so as we get to the point where we are assigning ability scores we'll want to make sure that we put those highest values into wisdom strength or Charisma I'm going to make a note of that on a piece of paper here next we get into some actual things we can record on the character sheet first we have Arbor proficiencies we are proficient with cloth leather hide and chain mail armor and we are proficient for weapons simple melee weapons and simple ranged weapons we'll just make note of those for now next it indicates that we get a holy symbol so I'm going to move to the second page of the character sheet and under the other other equipment I will make a note that we have a holy symbol this will come into play when we are actually playing the game and using some of our powers next it indicates we have a bonus to our defense with a plus two to will so we'll go back to our first page of the character sheet and you can see that we have the will Saving throws and there's a box for our class where we can put that we have a plus two bonus next it indicates our hit points at first level are 12 plus our constitution score our hit points per per level are an additional five and then our healing surges per day is seven plus our constitution modifier since we don't know our Constitution's score or our constitution modifier just yet we will again make note of these and we will use them once we have those values it then indicates that we are trained in religion and by being trained that gives us a plus five in religion so we'll go ahead and Mark that down in this column here that indicates trained we will put a five and then we get to choose three more skills to be trained in at first level and it gives us a list that we can choose from Arcana diplomacy heal history insight and religion we are already trained in religion so we have to choose three from the other ones we'll go ahead and choose Arcana heal and history so I will come over to here and I will put that we are trained we'll get a five for Arcana a five for heal and a five for history next we get into the build options and there's two options presented the battle cleric and the devoted cleric and if we scroll forward onto that page we'll see that there are some suggested Feats and skills and powers that you could use what these are is basically pre-generated types of characters for you if you wanted to play a battle cleric that was doing more fighting then you could choose these values here if you wanted to choose a devoted cleric that was more about healing then you could choose these values here you don't have to use either of these it's more just to help it make make it simpler for you and get through the process a little faster we are going to make all the choices on our own so we're not going to actually do any of that in this so I'm going to just skip back here and we'll skip over that part the next thing it talks about is our class features which we get channel Divinity healer's lore healing word and ritual casting and if you scroll forward you'll see that there's more details about what those mean on this page so Channel Divinity healers lore healing word and ritual casting and just like I did with the racial features I'm just going to make a note of them on the page here and and make a note of the page number and with that completed that is the extent of everything that we get from the class as listed here so we can go back to our character creation screen and see what the next step is we've chosen our class and now it's time to determine the ability scores so let's move forward in the book to find where we do the ability scores and you can see that on page 17 there's a section about how you generate your ability scores the standard method for doing it is to use the standard array of 16 14 13 12 11 and 10 and what you would do is you just assign each of those values to one of the ability scores listed strength Constitution dexterity intelligence wisdom and Charisma you can assign those values to whichever of these that you want just remember that for from our race we got a Bonus of plus two to Constitution and a bonus of plus two to wisdom and our class indicated that our key skills that we needed were wisdom strength and Charisma so we're going to want to make sure that the higher values go into wisdom strength and Charisma and then take into account that we get those plus two bonuses so I think given where we are I'm going to put the highest value into wisdom so that would be a 16 which I get a plus two from our race so that makes that one an 18. and then the next thing the next highest value I'm going to put as a strength so that would be the 14 for strength the next highest value would be a 13 and I will put that into charisma next I have to assign the 12 and I think I will put that in Constitution and I do get a plus 2 to my Constitution because of my racial bonus so since I'm putting a 12 with a plus 2 that makes the Constitution 14. and then the other two doesn't really make much difference I'll go ahead and put the 11 inch dexterity and the 10 into intelligence next we can calculate our ability modifiers and to do that it's the same that you would do if you were running this in fifth edition the same formula applies so the 14s have ability modifier of two the 11 and the 10 would happen really modifier of 0 the 18 has an ability modifier of four and the Charisma would have an ability modifier of one and this information is actually on page 17 of the player's handbook fourth edition also has the additional field here for your modifier plus half your level since we're at level one half of our level you would always round down so that would be a zero so these actually would be the same right now as the ability modifier but as you level up these would increase there are a couple other options for how you can generate ability scores you could use a Point by system and there's also an option for Rolling scores if you'd like to do that and so now we have our ability scores the next thing is to choose our skills which we actually already did when we went through our class if you recall we had the bonus from our race for two of the skills and then we had the ones that we were trained in that we selected for our class so we've actually already done that for the class so we'll skip over that and move on to step five which is choosing our feet and if we go through there we get a feat at first level and we'll move ahead to chapter six that has a list of all the different Feats to choose from and there's quite a few of them there is a nice table that actually tells you all the Feats and what they do and some of the prerequisites you'll need to make sure you pay attention to the prerequisites to ensure that you have those we're going to keep this fairly simple and I'm going to choose Dwarven weapon training which the only prerequisite is that you have to be a dwarf which we are and it gives us plus two damage and proficiency with axes and hammers so I am going to make a note of that Dwarven rep weapon sorry Dwarven weapon training and I will make note of that in the feeds box turning back to our character creation we have now selected our feet and then we get two powers and so everything that we've done so far is actually very similar to what you would have if you were creating a character for another version of Dungeons and Dragons this is where it's going to get a little different though this is where in fourth edition we're going to be selecting Powers there are at will Powers there are encounter Powers there are daily powers and these do special abilities some of them will let you attack with your weapon and then Grant some additional thing that you can do other ones can provide healing there's lots of things that they do the at will Powers you can use as many times as you want the encounter powers can only be used once per encounter and the daily powers can only be used once per day so if we go to the actual class we can see what those powers are and you can see that we have a number of at-wheel powers to choose from we can choose two of these at first level and then we can choose one encounter power and then one daily power I'm going to go ahead and make those selections and I will write those down into the at will encounter in Daily power boxes so now I've made note of the powers that I've selected for the cleric at first level and I'll have some other videos where we dig into what these powers mean and how to use them but these are the ones that I've selected for this character let's jump back to our character creation process and we've selected the powers and next we're going to choose our equipment to choose our equipment we start out with 100 gold and just as you would in other versions of DnD you can go through the armor table and the weapon table and you can select whatever adventuring gear that you want you're free to look through the table and decide what you want I'm just going to go ahead and jot down on the sheet under the equipment what exactly that we got with the choices of armor and Weapon made I am going to go back to our character creation list and the next part is where we can actually start filling in all of the rest of the numbers we have all the information we need to start doing all the remaining calculations so let me go back to page one and let's start filling in everything that we need for the armor that we chose we have leather armor and it gives us a plus two so I will put a 2 in here and this is going to be 10 plus half our level which is going to be 10 which means our armor class will be 12. we didn't get any bonus extra bonuses from our class for these but we can fill in the ability modifier and so the fortitude uses the higher ability modifier from here which would actually be two because it's the same and then under reflex those are also both zero so that's the same but for wisdom and Charisma they both feed into will we will take the higher value which will be a two and then again it's going to be 10 plus half hour level which is just going to be 10 across the board and then we can add all those up and that gives us a 12 for our fortitude a 10 for our reflex and then a 16 for our will we can fill in our initiative we know our dexterity modifier is actually zero which means that our initiative is also going to be zero we can jump over to our speed we don't have any penalties or bonuses for our speed which means it's going to be five squares are hit points we now know our constitution modifier and our constitution score so we can calculate our hit points if you remember our hit points at first level we're going to be 12 plus our constitution score our constitution score is 14 and 12 on in addition to that means our starting hit points will be 26. the bloodied value will be half of our maximum hit points The Surge value is then a quarter of our total hit points which you would round down which means it's going to be six and then our surges per day is seven plus our constitution modifier the Constitution modifier is two seven plus two means we have nine healing surges per day we will start with one action point and then let's go ahead and fill out our skills since we know our modifiers for all the different abilities we could start filling those in here we would get to add the half level as we level up right now though all those values are the same I like to go through one by one through the different abilities and fill those in so here we have dexterity is going to be a zero so I will go to all the ones that have dexterity and I can just fill in a zero the next one we have is intelligence and that is also a zero so I can do the same there the next one is strength which is a two so I will fill in the strength one there's only the one next is charisma which gives us a bonus of one the ability score modifier for Charisma is a one and that's all of those then we can carry over all these and add them up so acrobatics is zero Arcana is five acrobat Athletics is two Bluff is one diplomacy is one dungeoneering is six and on Down the Line and with all the skills filled in we actually now have enough information to fill in our passive insight and our passive perception these are going to be 10 plus the skill bonuses for those so Insight our skill bonus is four and perception our skill bonuses also for so we can add those to 10 which means the passive insight and passive perceptions are both 14. and next we get to our attack workspace now this is broken up a little differently from what you would see in fifth edition or some other versions the data is the same but it's just split up a little uh in a strange way I'm not sure why they did it but the first thing is we're going to do our attack and so for our weapon we're going to do a Warhammer was that was the equipment that we picked up when we purchased our equipment and we get to add half our level our ability score bonus for this will be a two um our proficiency bonus will also be a 2 for this weapon because we are proficient with it which means that our attack bonus for this is going to be a plus four I did not choose a ranged weapon but if you were to choose a ranged weapon or a second weapon you would repeat that process here and for the second weapon and then we have the damage Works sheet so we're going to go ahead and write our Warhammer again and the ability for this one is strength and that is the only value that we would have in here the damage for the Warhammer is 1d10 and it's going to be plus that strength um and then what you can do is you can actually carry those down into these base attacks so for the Warhammer we could write that one down in here and we would say that the attack is a plus four versus Armor class and the damage is going to be 1d10 plus 2. if you look on the second page of the sheet you'll see that there are additional fields in here that you can fill out with personality traits and mannerisms and other things to help give your character some flavor but those aren't necessary to get you started you could fill those out along the way as you go but that is actually all the information that we need to provide for this character to get ready to go on an adventure uh if you played fifth edition or third edition or some other role-playing games you'll find that making the fourth edition character is nearly identical in process to those versions of the game the biggest difference is really the selection of powers uh the really nice thing about fourth edition is that while every character is very different the process of creating them is exactly the same so whether you're creating a human fighter or a ladrin wizard the process of building those characters is is very similar or nearly identical there are no special rules that make some classes less approachable than others I hope this helped you and made you ready to make your own fourth edition characters in the future I'm going to dig in and show you how the different powers work and some of the other rules around the game to help you play your character a little better but I hope this is enough to get started let me know if you have any questions down in the comments or if there's other things you would like me to cover in more detail I would love to hear from you until next time take care

Channel: OldeGreybeard

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Keywords: dungeons, dragons, d20, 5e, dice, D&D, dungeons & dragons, d&d newbie, d&d dice beginner's guide, D&D session 0, learn to play D&D, dungeons and dragons, D&D questions, rule book, d&d, review, d&d 4e, d&d 4th edition, dnd, dungeon master's guide, 4th edition, 4e, dnd 4e, dm guide, 4e starter set, talk about D&D, one dnd, wizards of the coast, paizo, open RPG Creative License, ORC, kobold press, project black flag, kobold black flag, 5e nexus, demiplane, project 5.4, dnd srd

Id: 6IgBV8Q7AiM

Length: 20min 52sec (1252 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023